The upright frame which held the reflective glass was reinforced by some invisible presence, or made of a material not yet widely known, as that which is supposed to break. I have heard some friends who have visited me say they believe the structure of it is made of bones.
“Where did you buy it from?” Annie asked after we had watched a movie together in the evening. “Or was it a gift?”
She had stumbled across it after I granted her access to the attic to take some supplies I knew she could make use of in her law office.
After she had come back down to the living room, her face was pale and something seemed to nauseate her, as though she ate something that made her sick.
As she had been an attorney in the family courts, I reasoned something so seemingly small upsetting her was difficult to do, and yet there she stood, unsettled.
“We found it in a flea market in Santa Monica,” I said.
Sometimes I could swear that the scent of saltwater still wafted off of it. Still, there was nothing remotely Californian about the piece in terms of design. It resembled a piece of Victorian architecture far more than it embodied any kind of sunny aesthetic.
The ivory parts that held the mirror together on the outside had intricate ridge lines carved into it, each symbol more glyph-like than the other, as though they were the byproduct of some obscure and ancient Druidic culture.
“Who’s we?”
“My best friend at the time and I went down there to try and buy furniture since we had moved into a new place.”
I walked up to her and tried to hold her, but she pushed me away lightly enough not to be disrespectful but with the right amount of physical exertion to get her point across.
“I don’t like what it showed me,” she said.
“You’re striking, there’s no need to wonder about that.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she said as she turned her back on me and headed for the door.
I matched her pace and grabbed her hand, a risky move I knew could result in upsetting her further.
“Sit down and let’s talk this out,” I said as I guided her towards the sofa.
We took our seats and I looked into her eyes. I waited for her to express any kind of issue which may have been on her mind.
“My therapist says I have body dysmorphia,” she said as she buried her head into my chest.
I stroked the back of her head and tried to will myself to engulf her in the warmest hug I could. She reciprocated and placed her hands on my spine.
“That’s terrible, but it’s not uncommon at all. I’m not a psychiatrist, but shouldn’t it be a good thing to know the faults you see are not what everyone else does? How do they perceive the exact opposite?”
Annie leaned back and took a long pause.
“If you view yourself as ugly,” I said, “you’re wrong.”
“What your mirror showed me was far worse than anything I have ever seen.”
* I had her stand in front of the mirror with me behind her. My hands were on her hips.
She kept her composure for the first minute, but within a matter of time, she quivered, shook, and turned away. The dust mites we had stirred floated around the two of us, made more visible by the moon’s radiance which seeped in through the ceiling’s skylight.
“I need to go out to the yard,” she said. “I need fresh air.”
We did, and the stars looked down at us with a cold and luminescent neutrality. I wanted to know as I looked at space if there were other life forms whose self-analysis was as complicated as the average human’s.
“Please tell me what your eyes are catching that mine aren’t,” I said.
“Someone malformed, hunchbacked, feeble, frail and gross. The flaws are the most noticeable part of me. I look like one of the wayward sisters from Macbeth.”
I found that absurd, but I showed my blatant disagreement by kissing her.
We went to bed and I woke in the middle of the night. Fractured sleep was not uncommon, but this time it was difficult to get slumber again, so I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water.
As I was filling my cup, I heard a scratching noise.
I followed the sounds and it led me to the attic door. I opened it and climbed into the cramped space again.
There the mirror sat, and I stared at myself in it by happenstance as I lifted a few boxes to try and see if a stray cat or rodent was within the vicinity.
What I saw looking back at me was a hybrid of different life forms, very few of them biologically close to the average person.
A man with pockmark scars littering his face and boils gaped at me, as though he yearned for me to reach through the glass and commit a mercy killing to put him out of his misery.
His jaw hung low and he extended a hand out as though he wanted me to grab it and pull him through to the other side. I could not hear him groan with as much agony as I expected, because whatever sound he made was what I did - we were doppelgängers in every way except for visual appearance.
He wore the same blue bathrobe and slippers as me, but his hair was greasy and his flesh possessed so many pustules, grotesque and whose origins were unclear. It was like this variation of me had crawled across a landscape littered with blistering dunes. He was in dire need of skin grafts.
I touched my right forearm to make sure the concavities and wounds present in the mirror were not real, and all I felt was the smoothness of my unharmed musculature.
What did match was the look of confusion and terror on my face.
I kicked it down. It toppled over and I went downstairs. I made a vow to destroy it in the morning.
*
I could not wait. I ran into the attic, opened the skylight pane, and hoisted the mirror through it, surprised the dimensions fit. I hoisted it up and out with my palm to send it over the edge of the roof.
I waited for it to shatter, but there was no noise, so I used an empty milk crate in the corner as a footstool to peek my head out into the night air.
I checked to see if it had not gone past the house’s covering, but could see nothing except heating coils and a few weather-warped tiles underneath a brewing storm cloud.
I went outside and saw the mirror on the lawn. Somehow it had been positioned upright again, as though some nocturnal traveler had repositioned it and fled before I could get there. How such an abused event could have happened was beyond my understanding, as was the reason as to why, but it was the only explanation I could come to.
It was in one piece.
There were no cracked or shattered parts, which made me as angry as I was confused. I walked up to it and ran my hand over it.
Staring back at me was the same hideous man, but with more scar tissue around his throat than I could recall the first time I had seen him.
I smacked the object and it fell over. I dragged it into the driveway, went into the garage, made my way up the steps, and snuck into our bedroom. I retrieved my truck’s keys went back to where the vehicle was parked and started the ignition.
I ran the mirror over, the sound of it pummeling beneath the wheels. The guttural groan of the engine filled the ether. I wanted to hear crunched glass, but none of it was audible. I stepped out and walked up to it. It was fine, as though it did not have four thousand pounds roll over it.
I grabbed a hammer from my toolbox and attempted to smash the thing. The blunt end of the tool bounced off.
I placed it in the bed of my truck and drove six miles out to an open field adjacent to an airport. Along the way, I stopped at a convenience store and purchased a bottle of kerosene and matches.
I took the mirror, threw it onto a mound, and doused it with enough flammable liquid to make it appear as though I was performing some kind of scrying method. I reached into my pocket, retrieved the wooden sticks, and flicked the fire to life. I threw it into the puddle and watched the piece burn. I was the pyromaniac version of Nostradamus.
The way it warmed me calmed my nerves. I took an emergency fire extinguisher from the truck and swept the foam over it.
Once it was out, I was surprised to find that nothing about it had changed, and even the glass had failed to melt. *
“I cannot destroy the mirror no matter how hard I try,” I told Annie as we laid next to each other in the bedroom. “It’s the most durable object I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s like it was engineered by a secret government agency or something. I know how stupid that sounds, but it’s so alien to me. I left it out there. It’s in the desert right now, probably already collected by someone else.”
“What did the merchant who sold it to you look like?”
“I don’t remember,” I said with a shrug. “I think he was an old man. He was short on words. I remember him being very uncaring about the whole transaction. He wasn’t happy or amused that we were interested in it.”
“It wasn’t your best friend that you were with,” she said.
Her sentence hung in the air, a solid weight that became one around my neck.
“Excuse me?”
“It was your ex-girlfriend. You could have been honest with me about that. I know it makes you uncomfortable to talk about her, but if we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives, then we need to be able to have conversations that aren’t always fun.”
She got me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s only…it was a bad time. I’ve learned that it’s best not to talk about exes sometimes.”
“Sometimes it’s good to know that your partner learned some lessons the last go around,” she said. “It sounds like you two loved each other. If you’re not over her, I’m not jealous about that.”
“I never thought you were. That mirror was the last thing we ever bought together. Before she drowned.”
Annie nodded and her face softened, suddenly compassionate. She hugged me and we held each other. I had not cried in over four years, not since that day Natalie went swimming and resurfaced without life. We laid down, and both fell into slumber.
*
When my eyes opened, the lights in the room seemed brighter. I squinted against the overwhelming fluorescence.
I checked the windows to see if the sun had risen, and it was still pitch black outside the walls.
I sat up and walked to the bathroom. The abode was exceptionally silent, with each step I took echoing.
Annie was leaning over the sink, and her makeup astounded me based on how horrifying it was. Her eyes resembled glass, her skin was discolored and bloated.
Her entire body was blueish gray, and her hair was damp as though she had stepped out of the shower, but there was no trail of steam anywhere in the mirror in front of her. It occurred to me that she had not been playing with her beauty kit, but this was the way she somehow naturally appeared.
It was the same mirror I believed to have rid the house of, propped up on the hand basin.
“I’m like the woman you love now,” she said. “Can you finally see how I feel every time I see her staring back at me?”